Watch this hopeful message from 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 or read it below.
I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I am going to die on June 23, 2031 – at least according to the website, http://www.deathclock.com. Years ago, I entered my birth date, height, weight, sex, and body/mass index, along with whether or not I have been a smoker or a drinker. According to the formula they use for such things, I’ve got 6 years left on earth. They have me dying seven days before our 52nd wedding anniversary. I first read that about 20 years ago, and 2031 seemed a long way off. Seems a lot closer now.
According to the same authority, Karen is going to outlive me by four-and-a-half years. She dies on February 17, 2036.
Of course, their calculations may be all wrong. Probably are. Karen and I have walked two miles a day, five or six days a week, for decades. We exercise. I played basketball until I was well into my fifties. We could live to be 90. Maybe a hundred. I might not die on June 23rd, 2031. I might make it to May 1st, 2041. Or Karen and I might crash our hover car and die together on August, 16th, 2052. Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
But we are going to go.
In the sure and certain gloom of death, do our efforts to live loving, holy lives mean anything? Praying, reading Scripture, visiting the sick, practicing generosity—none of that is going to exempt us from dying.
The apostle Paul was just plain blunt about this. He wrote to the Corinthians: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”[1] If death has the last word, then our efforts are useless. Religion is meaningless. Preaching is vain.
But death, Paul insists, does not have the last word, as Jesus’s resurrection proved. The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg put it this way: “The evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.”
That’s what we’re thinking about this morning: how Jesus’s resurrection changes the way we live. If resurrection is not changing us now, there is reason to doubt that it will change us in the future. And we need that future change. Paul says in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”
Those of our species who will survive death must be changed in the very makeup of their bodies and their souls. We’re talking about an evolutionary leap that dwarves anything Darwin ever imagined. Because “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we need to be changed.
But isn’t there a problem here? Jesus said that people can enter the kingdom of God in this life, in this “flesh and blood.” He said that prostitutes and tax collectors were already entering the kingdom of God while he was on earth.[2] Is Paul contradicting Jesus? The Lord says we can enter the kingdom as flesh and blood people, but Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.
There is no contradiction. Think of it this way: You can enter the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. In fact, you are invited to do so (for a fee). You might even get a job there. But entering or working at the Biltmore is far different from inheriting the Biltmore. Anyone can enter the kingdom of God who chooses to do so. In fact, everyone is invited to do so (and the fee has already been paid). You can even get a job in the kingdom; everyone who enters does. But that is not the same thing as inheriting the kingdom. Flesh and blood cannot do that. To inherit the kingdom, you need to be a family member – one who shares the life of Jesus Christ – and even then, before you can come into your inheritance you will need to be changed. And that, verse 51, involves a mystery.
Mystery is one of the great Pauline words. Three out of every four times it is used in the New Testament it comes from his pen. A mystery, in Paul’s sense of the word, is something hitherto unknown about God’s plan, something that, apart from divine revelation, no one would ever guess. But God has made it known.
In the Bible, there are many such mysteries – things once hidden, but now revealed. For example: the mystery of Christ’s indwelling;[3] the mystery of the union of Gentiles and Jews in the church;[4] the great mystery of God in a human body.[5] In our passage, Paul gives us yet another one: “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”
We’ll think about the nature of that change in a moment, but before we do, I need to say something. It’s true that the Bible has unveiled many mysteries, but God has not let all his secrets out of the bag (Deut. 29:29). Some people seem to think that what we have in the Bible is not only all we need to know, but all there is to know. It is true that we have all we need to know in order to be included in his salvation; but it is hardly all there is to know.
The secret things belong to the Lord, and he is not telling all his secrets—perhaps only a tiny percentage of them. We are surrounded by mystery. We are a mystery. Apart from God himself, we may be the biggest mystery of all.
But in verse 51, we have a mystery that has been, at least in part, revealed. Remember that flesh and blood must be changed in order to inherit the kingdom of God, and that change happens after death. There are currently no direct flights to the age to come. We are all booked for a layover at the terminal we call death.
I read a few years ago that one airport has been consistently voted the worst in the nation: Newark, New Jersey. If you can avoid Newark, you will. But say you want to go to Bermuda, your favorite place on earth, and every flight goes through Newark. You’d put up with Newark if it meant Bermuda. That is like death. We don’t like it and we’ll do our best to avoid it, but if it is only a layover on our way to glory, we can put up with it.
But here Paul lets us in on a secret. He unlocks a mystery for us: not everyone will enter heaven that way. God is going to book some people on a direct flight without a layover in death.
“We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Sleep here refers to death. In fact, fifteen of the eighteen times the word occurs in the New Testament, it refers to death. Do you see what that means? The early Christians were not overawed by death. They thought of it like we think of falling asleep. It’s not a big deal – at least, not for someone who is connected to Christ through faith.
But Paul says, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” It is possible that some of us in this room are going to be changed without dying. In the New Testament, the word change is often used in the sense of “exchange.” To make it in the age to come, we will need to exchange this flesh and blood body for what Paul calls a spiritual body. Some Christians will make that exchange without passing through death.
(By the way, “spiritual body” does not mean a body made of spirit, just like an electric car does not mean a car made of electricity. A spiritual body is powered by spirit, not by flesh and blood. It’s not a ghost; it’s not anything like a ghost.)
Do you understand what Paul is saying here? Some people are booked on a direct flight for the age to come. They will be changed, but they won’t die. That was hitherto unknown and unexpected; it was a mystery.
Verse 52: “In a flash…” The Greek word is atomos, from which we get our word “atom”; it signified a thing that could not be divided. Here it refers to a moment of time so brief as to be indivisible. “…in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” Darwin would have said that such a leap forward would take millions of years. God will accomplish it in a nanosecond.
This change Paul speaks of is not only a major step for us, but for the entire universe because we are not the only ones being changed. The author of Hebrews, uses this same word when he writes that God will change the heavens and the earth “like a garment.”[6] God is not only going to reclothe us with a spiritual body; he is going to reclothe the universe.
This same word for “change” is also used of the demonized man of Gadara. That poor man saw the world in a daze, through a fog. Everything was unclear to him, and hateful. Then Jesus changed him. We read that when the townsfolk next saw him, he was “sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind.”[7] I think the change from flesh and blood to spiritual body will be something like that: it will be like waking up from sleep—for some people, from a nightmare. When we are clothed in our new, spiritual body, the bad dreams will be over. We will be awake to realities we never knew existed.
Paul says that the change, verse 53, will be from perishable to imperishable. The word perishable has the idea of a thing that is subject to corruption, to falling apart, becoming worthless. That describes us now, when “the outward man wastes away”; but when we are changed, that will no longer be the case. We will be imperishable.
Before the change, we are mortal (the Greek word means, characterized by death) but after the change we will have immortality (or literally, deathlessness.) Flesh and blood are death-full. Everyone dies! Maybe not on June 23rd, 2031, but (apart from the mysterious exception of verse 51) none of us gets out alive. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “In the midst of life, we are in death.” But it is even worse than that: death is in us, and has been ever since Adam’s rebellion. But the enormous change of verses 51 and 52 will transform us from death-full to deathless beings.
That has been God’s plan all along. Isaiah the prophet foresaw this a millennium before Paul, and Paul quotes him in verse 54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” In Paul’s Greek it is actually, “Death has been swallowed down.” You know who swallowed it, don’t you? The Captain of our salvation, the Lord Jesus himself. He swallowed death, and it went down hard. He took death into himself so that he could take it out of us, so that it would be possible to transform human beings from death-full mortals to deathless immortals.
Christ has taken the victory away from death and given it, verse 57, to us! There was a time when victory belonged to death. Itreigned asthe undefeated champion of the world.
Death was winning all its matches, though according to the Scriptures, there were a couple of forfeits: both Enoch and Elijah were called away before their match could take place). But then death met Jesus Christ, and he swallowed it down. He took, verse 55, its sting.
A father was riding in a car with his young son, who was deathly allergic to bee stings. When a bee appeared in the car, the boy panicked and started swatting at it. The father saw it was a honeybee, and that his son was going to get stung if he didn’t do something. So, in one lightning-fast motion, he grabbed the bee out of the air.
He winced, then opened his hand and the bee flew away. The boy began to squirm again and whine, but his father assured him that the bee could no longer harm him. He had taken its sting. We were afraid of death, and we had good reason to be. Humans are deathly allergic to it. But Jesus took its sting.
The scholar Jaroslav Pelikan edited a four-volume work he called, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Among the creeds, he included one from the Masai tribe of Nigeria. In their creed, Masai believers say that Jesus “was always on safari, doing good.” They declare that Jesus was “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is Lord.”[8]
Pelikan says that when a Nigerian student translated that creed for him, he got the shivers. “The hyenas did not touch him.” Death met Jesus, and he swallowed it down, and gave the victory to us.
That is why I can look at June 23, 2031 (or whatever date it might be) and say, “I know it’s on the calendar, but that’s alright. Death is not my destination. I’ll just be passing through.” And who knows? I may not even do that. Perhaps I, and you with me, will be spared that nasty layover. Because of Jesus, Death does not have the last word.
And because death does not have the last word, our commitment to Jesus is not in vain. Because I am connected to Jesus through faith, he imparts his life to me, and that life makes possible the change from mortal to immortal, from perishable to imperishable. But understand: the change begins as soon as the connection is established. You can’t have Jesus’s death-defeating, God-obeying, devil-defying life and not be changed.
Because death does not have the last word, “we know that our labor in the Lord,” verse 58, “is not in vain.” What we do for the Lord makes a difference, if not in the world, then in us. So, we stand firm We let nothing move us. We always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord.
But how? How do we stand firm or, as the Greek has it, “become firm”? How can we become unmovable (which is a literal translation of the phrase, “Let nothing move you”)? I once heard about a Kung Fu master who positioned his body just so, then his disciple tried to push him down. Then two disciples. Then three, and four, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t push him down. It was like pushing an oak.
That is something like what Paul had in mind. We become unmovable like the deep-rooted oak, and we cannot be pushed out of the path of devotion to Christ. Are we more like the oak or like its leaf, which is blown here and there? Paul wants us to be unmovable, rooted and grounded in Christ.
If that is going to be true of you, you’ll need to send your roots deep, and send many of them. You will need to draw life and nourishment daily from Christ himself, through prayer and the reading of Scripture. If you haven’t learned how to do that, talk to me after the service. If you need to be somewhere – it is Mother’s Day – call me, or email, or text. But don’t procrastinate. This is important.
But sending your roots deep is not enough; you also need to send them wide. Learn to draw life from Christ through worship (there’s more to it than just coming to church), through spiritual disciplines like solitude and silence, giving, and service, through community, spending regular, meaningful time with other Christians. Let your roots become a rich and complex system that connects you to Christ in a thousand different ways. That’s how you become firm and unmovable. Sunday mornings alone cannot provide that.
This is verse 58 “Give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.” In the original language this phrase is, “overflowing in the work of the Lord.” Every Christian needs to be involved in the work of the Lord. If you’re not, it is time you got started. If you don’t know where to start, we’ll figure that out together, and we’ll do it in a way that fits who you are. Too many people try to do as little as possible for God and still get by. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be like Jesus, and give all we can.
When death comes to people who are overflowing in the work of the Lord, they will find no terror in it. When Christ comes (which will make the coming of death seem trivial), those who are overflowing the in the work of the Lord will find no terror in him. That cannot be said for those who are not. I’d rather not be found among their company.
How about you?
[1] 1 Corinthians 15:19
[2] Matthew 21:31
[3] Colossians 1:27
[4] Ephesians 3:6
[5] 1 Timothy 3:16
[6] Hebrews 1:12
[7] Luke 8:35
[8] Timothy George, “Delighted by Doctrine,” Christian History and Biography (Summer 2006)
The Way Home 